When Mark Wong started analyzing 489 entomology studies that cover every continent, major habitat, and bioma on Earth, he had a simple goal: counting ants. The journey to the final answer is long, and often boring. Then, one day, Wong and his fellow ants came out from the other side.
According to a new paper published Monday in the PNAS journal, an international team of scientists shows there are 20 quadrillion ants roaming the planet today. That's 20,00,000,000,000,000,000000 of six-legged insects that you capture from pollinators, spreading the seeds like a little gardener and drooling after a roasted bagel.
"We further estimate that the world's ants collectively form about 12 megatons of dried carbon," said Wong, an ecologist at the faculty of Biology Science University of Western Australia. "Surprisingly, this exceeds the biomass of all wild birds and mammals in the world."
To put a surprising amount of it into perspective, multiply the team's biomass estimate by five. The amount you get is equal to the entire human biomass on Earth. — And this is probably a conservative estimate. Each of the 489 global studies is quite thorough — Using dozens of trap tactics such as catching ants who escape in the trenches of little plastic containers and gently wagging the leaves to find out how many are taking shelter in a crispy house. But like most research efforts, warnings remain.
The location of the sample retrieval, Wong explained, is uneven in the entire geographic region, for example, and most of it is collected from the soil. "We only have a little information about the number of ants in a tree or under the ground," he said. "It means our findings are rather incomplete."
